“They listened politely and showed us the door,” I replied.
“So what are you going to do?”
I thought about it.
It had been a game enough effort to get taken seriously by Disney, but in the end, it had been my Burroughsian “dream-self” who had believed it might be possible to get a seat at the table, and now the reality was here, and that reality that my quest had been a Walter Mitty fantasy, and now I had been put back in my place, gently and politely to be sure, but there was no doubt that the dream of having a strategic voice was just that, a dream.
Toldja, I said to myself. You were kidding yourself.
Deal with it.
“Oh well,” I said. “I’ll keep blogging. You never know, maybe something good will happen.”
Falling Farther Behind
As January rolled on, the drumbeat for The Hunger Games steadily increased on all fronts while the John Carter campaign haltingly moved forward in fits and starts. On the publicity front, through the entire month of January, John Carter--moving into the final stages of its campaign prior to a March 9th release--generated a total of 170 article placements. By contrast, Disney’s The Avengers, not due out until May 4th, generated 520 placements and The Hunger Games, ‘Carter’s chief rival for March buzz, generated 540 placements.231
The disparity between John Carter and The Hunger Games was even more apparent on Facebook, where John Carter managed to add only 11,183 new fans with 14,156 “talking about” the movie, in contrast to The Hunger Games who within January alone added 775,000 new fans and logged 451,000 “talking about.”232 The same pattern repeated itself throughout the social media universe -- Twitter, blogs, message boards were all buzzing for The Hunger Games, while John Carter remained mired in what, when held up next to The Hunger Games efforts, seemed like a sleepwalking trance. Particularly vexing to John Carter enthusiasts was the flatness and lack of verve in the John Carter Facebook postings. For the entire month of January, the John Carter stories and updates on Facebook consisted of the following 15 posts:
Date/Full Text/Comments/Shares
Jan 2/The River Iss (w/photo)/27/26
Jan 3/What is Barsoomian for Earth?/0/0
Jan 6/You’ve been sent a Barsoomian message. Click to translate/64/3
Jan 11/Get a better look at Woola and the thoats in new John Carter Poster/80/217
Jan 12/Play Lost Symbol and uncover exclusive John Carter art/121/116
Jan 13/John Carter “Awakening” TV Spot/32/165
Jan 14/On Barsoom, John Carter is caught in a war between two societies, Zodanga and Helium. Who would you fight for?/127/35
Jan 17/50 Days/107/300
Jan 19/In John Carter, Taylor Kitsch did 90% of his own stunts, including an 85 foot jump during the learning to walk sequence./53/15
Jan 23/Accidentally transported to Barsoom, John Carter begins a journey to save his newfound world./95/74
Jan 24/Is your name John Carter? Sign up now for an invitation to an advance screening/262
Jan 25/Translate this message/25/4
Jan 26/Have you unlocked the exclusive concept art in Lost Symbols Level 3?/60
Jan 27/Woola would find John Carter anywhere on Barsoom. /94/137
By contrast while John Carter was logging only 939 comments and 1259 shares for the month of January, The Hunger Games during the same period logged 14,939 comments and 13,749 shares. The Lorax, who would emerge to become an even bigger threat to John Carter, logged five times as many comments as John Carter (3,956 to 939) and four times as many shares (4,337 to 1,259).233
As problematic as the lack of buzz, was the fact that what buzz there was for John Carter skewed negative with an overall positive/negative sentiment ratio holding at 7/5 -- while The Hunger Games was holding on to a 9/1 ratio and The Lorax was running at 8/2.
By the end of January -- by every measure available, John Carter’s promotional posture was weak and getting weaker, while The Hunger Games rolled on like the juggernaut that it was, and The Lorax -- set for release a week ahead of John Carter -- was gaining momentum and showing signs that it would pose very significant problems for John Carter.
Ricky Strauss Takes Over
The devastatingly poor influencer and social media performance of the John Carter campaign in January played out against the backdrop of Disney’s announcement on January 13 that Ricky Strauss had been hired to replace MT Carney as President of worldwide marketing. Strauss was a veteran of Sony Pictures and most recently had served as President of Participant Media -- whose recent release “The Help” had been a success for Disney and Dreamworks. In reporting Strauss’s hiring, industry trade bible Variety called him a “familiar face” but noted that in hiring Strauss, Disney Studio chief Rich Ross was not backing off his demands for innovation -- demands that had led him to hire MT Carney from outside the circle of Hollywood marketers 18 months earlier. Marc Graser in Variety wrote:234
... it's not as though Ross is abandoning his demand for innovative film campaigns. Strauss' mandate will be to carry out Ross' wish to make marketing dollars work more efficiently by stretching beyond traditional ad buys and physical marketing materials.......Hiring of Strauss is not a change in direction for Ross, who still made "outside-the-box" thinking a key. As Participant Media president, Strauss shepherded the company's unique, socially conscious campaigns that turned to social media and partnerships with brands and organizations to target specific auds.
Now the job of reinventing Disney's marketing belongs to a guy who knows the old ways, too.
On the day Strauss was hired, the John Carter campaign had 8 weeks to go until opening day, and was by any measure in deep trouble. As the next major Disney release, and a $250M production investment, a decision had to be made -- would Strauss get a mandate to shake up the campaign and try to right the ship while there was, arguably, still time to make an impact?
Or was John Carter too far gone to be saved?
On January 19 Kim Masters, in an article in the industry bible The Hollywood Reporter, launched the latest and most potent iteration of the “out of control production” narrative that had yet appeared. In an article entitled “Mega Movies + New Directors = Big Drama” Masters wrote of John Carter:235
The 3D extravaganza has undergone a complete re-engineering, and the budget, originally $200 million, is widely rumored to have ballooned to $300 million. Industry sources with links to the project believe it might lead to a staggering write-down.....
According to several sources close to the project, the issues plaguing the film also result from a lack of experienced support for the director. One source associated with talent on John Carter says Stanton, 46, initially was allowed to pursue his vision with "no checks and balances, no star, no producer, nobody to keep him in check." In December 2010, when he showed a 170-minute cut to executives at Pixar and Disney, they found the story unclear and the characters not engaging. Stanton then began to re-engineer a film that already had been shot, creating storyboards of new sequences and cutting them into the footage. A few months later, he embarked on extensive and costly reshoots. Disney, which had anticipated John Carter as a trilogy, held off on discussing the next installment.
This was precisely the kind of publicity that the project didn’t need, and Andrew Stanton, when he read it, did not respond immediately other than a tweet on January 20, which responded to a question: “Any annoying myths about John Carter you’d like to dispel?”, to which he replied: “Was a DISNEY film that I completed on time, on budget, w/full support.”236
At Disney, the focus at the moment the Masters article came out was on a London preview session for UK journalists that was occupying most of the attention of the entire publicity team. No official reaction was issued; and no one from the publicity team contacted friendly journalists to get a counter-story out. As a result, the unchallenged narrative of “bloated, out-of-control production” took root and would begin to spread, to the intense detriment of John Carter.
Meanwhile Ricky Strauss, the new head of marketing, turned to a trusted resource, Janet Dubin whose Dubin Market Research Inc., had for years been a quietly successful and trusted resource for cracking the code of difficult marketing propositions like John Carter. Dubin’s longtime parter Roger Edwards would take the lead in what would be a last ditch effort for Disney’s new marketing leadership to find a solution. In the final weeks of January Edwards and Dubin would test market all the marketing materials and make recommendations for changes.
Would it be possible to right the ship?
Or, as was more likely, was the task handed to Edwards and Dubin the cinematic equivalent of being called in to consult on HMS Titanic after the ship had hit the iceberg?
At a minimum the iceberg was clearly in view at the time Dubin and Edwards got the call.
It was called The Super Bowl.
The Super Bowl Massacre
The official announcement that it had bought a Super Bowl Ad for John Carter came on January 12. For the 2012 Super Bowl, individual Ads were going for $3.5M, a huge amount to spend but a unique opportunity. More than 100 million sets of eyeballs would be available and most of them not only watched the game intently -- they watched the commercials. In fact, the Super Bowl ads got more attention from many viewers than the game itself -- and ads that clicked with Super Bowl fans would also receive millions of replays online from dozens of sites which aggregated all the ads and conducted audience polls.
For the John Carter campaign -- the Super Bowl ad represented an opportunity, one month ahead of release of the film, to change the narrative and create, for the first time, positive momentum for the film.
So ... what would be presented?
Within the Disney marketing team, the decision was made to put forward a sweepstakes ad which would contain a hidden code, which viewers could then send on March 9 to qualify for a sweepstakes gift which would be a trip to the 2013 Super Bowl.
On paper, the idea had at least some merit. Football fans would be encouraged to watch the ad closely in order to qualify for the sweepstakes prize.
But how to embed the code?
It was left to creative director Frank Chiocchi and Joseph Tamusaitis to figure out a way to implement the idea. Disney had purchased a 60 second spot, and this enabled a decision to create a spot that began with a 24 second pull-out from what would emerge as a mosaic of the “JOHN CARTER” title treatment, with multiple moving images playing simultaneously within the title treatment. This created a complex visual in which it would be easy enough to bury the code that audiences would have to dig out in order to qualify for the sweepstakes.
But there was a potential problem.
When a studio books an ad on the Super Bowl, even if it books a 60 second spot, there is a chance that it will get cut to 30 seconds if it comes up in the wrong spot in the ad rotation (typically an injury timeout) and thus Disney would have to submit both a 60 second and 30 second version, and run the risk of it being the 30 second version that plays.
With a 22 second pull-out that couldn’t be shortened because of the sweepstakes, the 30 second version was -- and there could be no doubt of this--a stinker. But the commitment to the sweepstakes was a “given” - and so the decision was made to roll the dice and hope that the sixty second ad would play.
For the second half of the 60 second ad, Chiocchi and Tamusaitis decided to depart from previous trailers. While it used the Kashmir cover that had dominated the earlier trailers for the first 30 seconds, the second half of the 60 second trailer used a piece of music by British orchestral composer Nick Ingman entitled, appropriately enough, “Mars.” Ingman had worked with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, and was known for bridging the gap between classical and pop. His “Mars” suite had been initially discovered by Andrew Stanton and director Erik Jessen a year earlier, when they had prepared a ‘sizzle reel’ (more akin to a director’s reel than a trailer, but serving a similar purpose) for which they had used Ingman’s “Mars.” The music, unlike all the music used until this point, was orchestral, blending voices, strings, and more, and had an epic, emotional pull to it. It marked a clear departure.
On February 5, 2012, the day of the Super Bowl, John Carter fans as well as crew members, cast members, director Andrew Stanton, and just about everyone involved with the film physically or emotionally, were waiting for the ad to play with perhaps more than the usual level of enthusiasm. There was a collective sense that the Super Bowl ad would mark the beginning of the “real push” and that it would contain something new -- a new direction for the TV spots and trailers.
Andrew Stanton was online tweeting to fans, and in his case, as a lifelong New England Patriots Fan, his attention was divided between the game and the prospect of the John Carter ad that would play. Hours before game time he tweeted: “4.5 hours until Emperor Belicheck has young Jedi Brady do his bidding.” Then: as the game began, a fan tweeted: “Want to see that JC ad now!” and Stanton replied: “Coming up soon ;-).”
Stanton in fact knew what was there -- he had been in discussions with Chiocchi and Tamusaitis and had suggested the Nick Ingman music that carried the second half of the sixty second spot.
Then fate intervened.
In the Super Bowl ad rotation, John Carter’s number came up in the wrong spot, an injury timeout in the second quarter, and when the ad played -- it was the 30 seconder consisting of 24 seconds pulling out from a mosaic of the John Carter title treatment with mini-movies playing within the letters, and 6 seconds of John Carter battling a white ape.237
It was a disaster.
Stanton, standing by and waiting for the full spot to play, and with thousands of Twitter followers monitoring him, went silent, then simply retweeted a tweet that the official John Carter Twitter account, scrambling to do damage control, put out:238
@John Carter RT by @AndrewStanton: The #Superbowl had the :30 #JohnCarter spot, but we have the :60. Watch: http://di.sn/eV
For any movie, the cut-down would have been damaging, but for John Carter, it was devastating and demoralizing to everyone involved. The one “big moment” that had a chance to reboot the narrative for John Carter had passed, and not only had the moment not been seized -- it had been squandered, and yet more damage had been inflicted on the campaign and the movie.
Online, the USA Today-Facebook Ad Meter rankings landed John Carter in last place among the seven movie ads that played, and in the bottom five overall among all 70 ads that played.239
Recognizing the disaster that was playing out, Disney scrambled to make the 60 second version available online as widely as possible. Unfortunately, the online audience is a tiny fraction of the Super Bowl audience. Six months after the 60 second ad appeared online, a total of 423,000 viewer had seen it, less than 1/2 of 1% of the Super Bowl audience.240
The big moment to shake things up had passed.
Frustration and an Impulse
Waiting for the Super Bowl ad to play on February 5, I was one of the many hoping to see something that would reboot the troubled campaign. If ever there existed a moment where a game changer was needed, this was it, and I was holding out hope that Ricky Strauss had shaken things up since his arrival three weeks earlier, and we would see a new direction in the campaign.
Then the ad played.
I watched the 22 second pullout, the 8 seconds of Carter fighting the white ape, and then it was over.
What just happened?
Beside me on the couch was my wife Rena, a film-making buddy Mark Linthecum, and Mark’s wife.
“Wow, what was that?” was Linthecum’s comment.
I stared at the TV. What the hell?
I had my laptop up and was monitoring the Twitter reaction, and what I saw caused my heart to sink. There was almost no spike in the #JohnCarter traffic and what there was, confirmed that the spot was widely viewed as poor -- an impression that would be reconfirmed repeatedly in coming days as the various Super Bowl Ad rating sites rated it in the bottom 5% of all Super Bowl ad
s and absolutely last place among the seven movie ads that played during the game.
As the game continued, a sense of defeat settled in.
This was it.
It was game over.
I ran the tracking software and confirmed that the volume of tweeting about the JC commercial was low, and the positive/negative ratio was bad.
This was the worst possible scenario for John Carter.
The one thing that had a real chance of turning the tide for the campaign -- a successful Super Bowl ad -- was not to be.
Not only had the Super Bowl ad not helped -- the 30 seconder that aired on TV was so bad that it was just feeding the negativity that was beginning to engulf the campaign. In all probability it had done more harm than good.
The game ended in the early evening in Burbank, and as I watched the New York Giants defeat the New England Patriots 21-17 an idea that had been floating at the back of my consciousness for weeks began to come into focus.
That idea was to download all the available trailers and TV spots that had been released by Disney and make my own damned trailer.
Why bother?
Answer: If for no other reason than to create at least the illusion of feeling like I could do something to affect the train wreck that was unfolding beyond my control.
I knew it was an illusion, but still.....
I explained to Mark what I had in mind. He was game. It occurred to both of us that this was, if nothing else, an intriguing opportunity to cut something with elements from a $250M studio film, a far cry from the elements that were normally available to us for an indie film. It was, simply on the creative level, a fantasy fulfilled to be able to work with this kind of material.
It took about an hour to find all the best available HD material online, download it, and get it organized in Final Cut Pro, the editing software that had become the standard for independent filmmakers. some of the material was only available in standard definition -- the Japanese trailer, and one kiddie trailer from the Disney channel that had a moment in it that I knew I wanted to use. We would just have to live with a mixture of HD and SD materials.
John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood Page 23
